Escaping Labyrinths: The Border and The Lost Children

English translation of two Spanish contemporary plays by Laila Ripoll: The Lost Children (Los ninos perdidos) and The Border (La frontera). The Border addresses the theme of immigration in an allegorical fashion. It shows the clash between a young man craving for progress and autonomy in a new land and the ghost of his grandfather who insists on tradition and memory. The Lost Children integrates fantasy and realism, pathos and esperpento as it revives the memory of a lost generation of children from the Republican era in Spain. In both these plays, Ripoll has created a unique and shifting reality cohabited by the living and the dead whose multidimensional existences often straddle between memory and imagination.